Happy to be Here!

IFOA Diaries on The Afterword

The National Post‘s literary blog The Afterword will be featuring guest posts by authors here in Toronto for the 31st annual International Festival of Authors. The Singer’s Gun author Emily St. John Mandel will be posting her thoughts throughout the next ten days.

Here’s a taste from her first post:

I leave for Toronto on Monday morning, and am delighted at the thought of spending a week there. I lived in Toronto for four and a half years, first as a student at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre and then for a singularly unfocused year and a half after graduation, but that time seems far enough away that the city’s only half-familiar now. I don’t, for instance, remember how the transit system works, although I do frequently wish they had red streetcars in New York. I’m not sure that I really know Cabbagetown anymore, although that was where I mostly lived; I wandered into the neighbourhood when I had a few hours to kill on an all-too-brief visit last summer, and was startled by the presence of a Starbucks on Parliament Street. The stores where I worked on Queen Street West seem to have vanished. I’ll have to learn the city all over again.